The Guam Caper

A New Yorker stalwart exits the war.

Sent back from his high post with the Twentieth Air Force, St. Clair McKelway wrote a strange, brilliant New Yorker piece, then waited thirteen years to tell the full story.

Illustration by David Hughes

Writing in the June 9, 1945, issue of The New Yorker, St. Clair McKelway devotes several paragraphs to a night rainstorm falling on Saipan, in the Mariana Islands. It is early December of the previous year, in wartime, and McKelway is standing in the pouring rain on a circular outdoor platform, in company with Brigadier General Haywood S. (Possum) Hansell, Jr., Brigadier General Emmett (Rosy) O’Donnell, and three or four lesser Army Air Force staff officers. Serious brass. Hansell, forty-one years old, is in command of the XXI Bomber Command of the Twentieth Air Force, whose fleet of B-29 bombers had, ten days earlier, on November 24th, launched the endlessly awaited initial raid in force on mainland Japanese industries. O’Donnell, who is thirty-eight, had been the lead pilot of the hundred and eleven bombers in that raid.

The four-engine Boeing B-29 bomber, still offstage here, should be seen as a prime player in this story: the preëminent new combat instrument of that part of the war. Pressurized to fly at twenty-five thousand feet or more, beyond the range of most anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighters, the enormous, silvery new planes had been spared the demeaning green-gray or camouflaged appearance of the familiar and battle-tested B-17s and B-24s. This Saipan assemblage is the precursor of the massive later B-29 forces—eventually numbering some eight hundred bombers, formed into five wings and based as well on the neighboring islands of Guam and Tinian—that burned out Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, and several dozen other Japanese cities in the spring and early summer of 1945, and, in effect, brought a close to the Second World War.

But that end and the terminating atomic-bomb raids on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are weeks away while McKelway is writing, and he is still back on that low platform. He and the generals are waiting for the return of the hundred-odd B-29s that are momentarily expected at the end of the three-thousand-mile, fifteen-hour round-trip journey to Japan, and are about to encounter a “big, black, dark thunderstorm, teamed with a heavy, tropical rainstorm [that] had reduced the ceiling over our landing strip to zero, zero, zero, and zero.” The bombers have no other place to land.

No one on the platform speaks when the first circling B-29s become audible and sometimes briefly visible overhead. McKelway resumes, “The rain fell on the just hardened concrete of the runway, on the black-topped asphalt of the taxiways and hardstands, splashed into the faces of the ground crews crouching in pup tents alongside the places where the homecoming B-29s would park, if they ever did park. It fell on the surrounding white-capped sea. It washed away some of the unfinished roads leading from the airstrip to the air crews’ quarters; it flooded already muddy roads and walks in wing and group and squadron establishments along the bluff over the sea. . . . It fell on the cemeteries of the Marine and Army men who had been killed in the battles that won the Marianas from the Japanese.”

I was also a member of the Army Air Forces in the Pacific (though at a duller part of it, as managing editor of the Seventh Air Force G.I. weekly magazine Brief, in Hawaii) when I first read this passage, a month or so after McKelway wrote it, and I admired his guile in postponing the dénouement of his circling-bombers drama, and also was astounded by his sweeping imitation of the famous passage in James Joyce’s story “The Dead” which begins “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.” Why McKelway was writing in this tone is only one of the questions and wonders that still surround the four-part work, “A Reporter with the B-29s,” which may be the strangest piece in this magazine’s history. For starters, one can say that it is the only New Yorker article that ever occasioned a full-length follow-up piece by the same writer, published thirteen years later, which explains much of the first one by revealing that he was insane at the time of its writing.

Back to those accumulating hundred-odd bombers and eleven hundred-odd airmen stranded aloft. “It was Possum who, after twenty-five minutes, saw something that could be put into speech,” McKelway continues. “ ‘It’s breaking over there,’ he said. Rosy took a look as Possum pointed. ‘That ought to be it,’ said Rosy, nodding.”

In three minutes some stars are out, and in four the planes are no longer distant lights but “had become the great, familiar, graceful forms with their high tails and long, intent noses.” All land safely.

McKelway, a brilliant and prolific writer, had been a staff member of The New Yorker since 1933, and in that time also became its first managing editor for factual stuff. He hired numbers of young reporters who went on to celebrated careers with the magazine, including E. J. Kahn, Philip Hamburger, and Brendan Gill. He’d had a deep immersion in newspapers, with stints at the New York World, the Herald Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, and (for three years) the Bangkok Daily Mail, in Siam. He wrote fiction (a little), light verse, Comment, Profiles—everything. His best-known piece was a six-part Profile of Walter Winchell, but his favorite subject was oddball criminals, like a master embezzler he called “the wily Wilby,” or an inveterate forger of one-dollar bills known as Mister 880. He had a lovely touch. One of his short stories, “First Marriage,” names its subject in a closing one-word sentence: “Milly.”

McKelway’s work has not been accorded the posthumous beatification attending the writings of A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, but a generous new anthology, “Reporting at Wit’s End: Tales from The New Yorker” (Bloomsbury; $16), with eighteen of his articles from the magazine and an introduction by Adam Gopnik, puts his work within reach once again, and high time. Liebling’s arresting wartime pieces from North Africa and Normandy and Paris made him almost as celebrated a war correspondent as Ernie Pyle, but he never had a whisper of the access, let alone the rank, of McKelway, up on that platform in the rain. By then a lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Forces, he was the Chief Censor and Chief Public Relations Officer of that XXI Bomber Command of the Twentieth Air Force. Commissioned a captain in 1942 (he was thirty-seven), he was attached to the budding B-29 program in Fort Worth, and accompanied it during its seventeen months of difficult preliminary practices and long-range skirmishings in India, Burma, and China. In his confessional piece of 1958, he writes that this was the period when he became Peter Roger Oboe—“Army alphabetical code for P.R.O. or Public Relations Officer . . . a label for a new and weird identity that, more or less against my inclinations, I had been forced to assume.” A sample of the routing address at the top of daily teletypes and radiograms that soon came flooding his way tells us that he was not just good at his new work (he was twice promoted in rank); he had become a significant player. “In the Marianas,” he writes, “when I was a lieutenant colonel, they said, ‘Arnold to LeMay from Norstad for Peter Roger Oboe info Nimitz,’ ” which translates as General H. H. (Hap) Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, to Major General Curtis E. LeMay, commander of the XXI Bomber Command (he’d succeeded Hansell), by way of Brigadier General Lauris Norstad, Chief of Staff of the Twentieth Air Force, to, yes, our man McKelway, and thence along to Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet and Pacific Ocean Areas. “As the war progressed,” McKelway explains, “I felt less and less like myself and more and more like Peter Roger Oboe.”

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. McKelway was called into service after an Army Air Forces major general named Barton K. Yount, who headed the Flying Training Command, read and admired a New Yorker Comment piece of his complaining about the manner in which news of the celebrated 1942 Jimmy Doolittle raid on Tokyo (an operation in which a handful of B-25 medium bombers were launched from a single aircraft carrier) had been handled by the armed forces. McKelway heard about Yount’s interest in him from the actor Burgess Meredith, “an old friend and fellow-habitué of the Artists & Writers Restaurant, ‘21,’ Tim Costello’s saloon, on Third Avenue, and other dives, high and low,” as he puts it. Yount had called up Meredith, a celebrity draftee in the Air Forces, and within days McKelway was contacted by a recruiting major, who met him for lunch at “21” and sounded him out about the B-29 P.R. job. McKelway agreed to accept a commission. Tens of thousands of male civilians—schoolteachers and advertising writers and farmers and lawyers and businessmen in their thirties and forties—were selected and signed aboard as future officers in this same informal fashion. Many of them must have experienced a moment like McKelway’s when, on his first day in uniform, he received a sidewalk salute on Madison Avenue and returned it with a three-fingered Boy Scout salute dredged up from his preteen unconscious. McKelway—whom we might as well call Mac here, the way everyone else did—was a good choice for a desk man who could be relied on to keep impending war news entirely secret and then, at the proper moment, give it the swiftest and widest distribution among waiting newspaper and radio reporters, but he was even better qualified as an exotic and cosmopolitan evening companion in the officers’ clubs of flyboy commanders.

I remember Mac in the flattering, laundry-whitened khaki “suntans” of the time, with a crumpled pilot’s cap and those silver leaves on his lapels. He was tall and slightly stooped, with prominent blue eyes, pink cheeks, horn-rimmed glasses, a pale-blond mustache, and a voice that would soften late at night with touches of his native North Carolina. He looked me up one day at Hickam Field and invited me, a sergeant, to dinner in his temporary quarters, along with my boss, Major Dick Hartwell. Mac was a longtime New Yorker friend of my mother and stepfather, Katharine and E. B. White, but that evening he made me feel that this was an everyday get-together of East Coast writers. A world-class charmer, he was married to and divorced (in friendly fashion) by five striking women. The last Mrs. Mac, Maeve Brennan, a petite Irish-born fiction writer with auburn hair, had laid waste to a dozen-odd New Yorker staff writers and artists before she found him and fell hard. One of her rivals or companions in their marriage was alcohol, as she had understood it would be, and she later told friends about a day when Mac came out to Idlewild to meet her, very cheerfully, on her return from a trip to Ireland. “I thought you were on the wagon,” she said. “I was,” he explained, “but I got off for a minute and when I came back somebody had taken my seat.”

Mac’s madness, Mac’s fugue—let’s call it a flight, in this story—is coming soon, and in a setting of unexpected and almost unparalleled military success. The Marianas had been invaded, in a bloody Navy and Marine and Army operation, beginning in June of 1944, specifically to provide the closest base within reach of Japan for the B-29s, which had been struggling to send a few planes at a time there from distant bases in China, and the clearing work and construction of heavy-duty airstrips began even before the islands were secure. (I still recall the thrill cast on our entire theatre by those first B-29 raids, and the glamorous appearance that one of the planes struck on our next cover of Brief, as it came down a Saipan runway—the low, long, sleekly shining fuselage, the upcurving tall tail, and that surprising cockpit greenhouse up forward.) On the early raids from Saipan, in November and December, B-29 crews had encountered daunting hundred-and-forty-mile-an-hour jet-stream winds at their planned altitude of twenty-seven thousand feet, and many failed to drop their bomb loads anywhere near the planned targets. Engine troubles had led to dozens of turnbacks and ditchings, with losses of entire crews.

In January, General Arnold, from Washington, replaced his B-29 commander, General Hansell, with the saturnine, cigar-chomping Major General Curtis LeMay, a celebrated figure with the Eighth Air Force, who had led one branch of the great Schweinfurt-Regensburg B-17 raids from England to Germany (and, in one part, all the way home to North Africa), in August, 1943. LeMay, in a remarkably bold reversal of tactics, ordered most of the defensive armament systems stripped out of the B-29s, and their high-explosive bomb loads replaced by M-69 jellied-gasoline incendiary bombs, up to six tons per plane. On the night of March 9, 1945, he launched a fleet of three hundred B-29s over Tokyo, with orders to attack at five to six thousand feet, instead of the height for which the planes had been designed. A majority of his flak experts had predicted a seventy-per-cent casualty rate among the planes, but it was quite the other way. The conflagration ignited in Tokyo fed on itself and became a firestorm that burned out sixteen square miles of the city and killed eighty-four thousand residents. More low-level raids, resumed two nights later and on alternate nights thereafter, attacked the industrial cities of Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya; no firestorms broke out, but the results were equally devastating. Later mass missions concentrated on the Japanese aircraft industry, and on port cities, where extensive mining operations in straits and harbors also paralyzed Japan’s shipping. By June, with the large metropolitan targets scratched off, there were systematic attacks on nearly sixty smaller cities. Later figures put the devastation caused by the B-29s before Hiroshima at sixty-five burned-out cities, five hundred and eighty-one destroyed factories, and a hundred and fifty-eight urban square miles turned to ashes, with accompanying casualties of three hundred and ten thousand dead, four hundred and twelve thousand wounded, and more than nine million rendered homeless. In the process, four hundred and thirty-seven B-29s were lost, mostly to flight failures, along with three thousand two hundred and sixty-seven officers and men.

Mac’s B-29 pieces are skimpy on the history of the plane itself, which had come together in an urgent wartime project that required major assembly plants in Kansas, Nebraska, Georgia, and Washington, and encountered a series of catastrophic failures and crashes along the way, mostly caused by overheating engines. The huge project was almost scrubbed in January of 1943, and only Arnold’s persistence brought it into being. The plane was still a beast to fly, pilots reported, particularly when loaded to capacity and fighting for speed after takeoff. The early crews were heroic, given the distances they had to fly and the near-impossibility of rescue after a ditching. McKelway produces one hero in particular, Sergeant Henry Eugene Erwin, of Bessemer, Alabama, who was the radio operator on a B-29 headed for Japan when one of the phosphorus bombs aboard ignited in mid-flight. Erwin picked up the flaming, sputtering thing and carried it forward through the length of the smoke-choked plane to the cockpit, where he managed to jettison it from the co-pilot’s window. He was severely burned and temporarily blinded but survived (as did his plane and crew), and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Early in May, McKelway, in his P.R.O. tent on Guam, should have been pleased with things. His staff ’s daily procedures with the press and the military censors were operating smoothly; the war in Europe had just ended, and the Pacific war, which had occupied his days and nights for almost two years, was in a state of flooding growth and success, with a fresh B-29 wing, the fifth, expected shortly on Guam. He was slated to be sent home soon, on a temporary assignment to the Pentagon ordered by General Norstad, the Twentieth Air Force’s commander, who wanted him to bring his long overseas experience to bear on the Twentieth Air Force’s public-relations planning.

Mac, however, had lately begun to obsess about the Navy, which owned this theatre, and which had shown signs of increasing dissatisfaction over the suddenly dominant role that the Twentieth Air Force was having in the war’s termination, now almost visible over the horizon. Inter-service rivalry was always a given, but the Navy side of things is almost understandable, at least from this distance, since it was the Navy’s costly and bloody operations at Midway, in the Solomon Islands, and in the Philippine Sea that had at last secured a western position in the Pacific that would give the Twentieth Air Force room to operate. Recently, though, there had been a ridiculous flareup about the status of a unit of Seventh Air Force P-51 fighter planes stationed on Iwo Jima, from which they flew missions in protection of the B-29s. The Seventh was under Navy jurisdiction but the B-29s were not, and eventually a weird agreement hammered out between the services stipulated that P-51s could be described as Navy forces whenever they took off to defend their island against attacking Japanese planes (an unlikelihood by now) but would become Twentieth Air Force fighters when they flew with the bombers. Just now, though, a Navy publicity release had appeared claiming that Admiral Nimitz’s P-51 fighters would be supplying fighter cover for the B-29s. The gaffe was drawn to the attention of General LeMay, who did not seem much concerned, but Mac couldn’t leave it alone. Then a tentmate of his, a young naval intelligence officer named George C. McGhee, told him about an inter-service meeting he had just come from where some Navy air people had urged that the B-29 command should mount fresh attacks on installations bordering the eastern Japanese coastline, which were targets within range of carrier-based Navy planes, enabling them to join the attack. LeMay had pointed out that these targets had already been obliterated and were not worth the risk of further American casualties, and, when the Navy guys persisted with their notion that the targets had to be attacked once again, he folded up his papers and walked out.

Mac couldn’t get over this. He couldn’t sleep—he’d had chronic troubles with sleep here—and went back to his P.R. tent, where he wrote out a polite protest about the P-51 release, and waited till two in the morning before handing it to a communications sergeant for immediate dispatch, so as to bring it to the attention of the right Pentagon people as they came to work that morning. He began to brood again about what he conceived as the Navy’s chronic obstruction of the B-29 program, which felt more and more serious to him, and then, as he wrote later, “I slipped a piece of paper into my typewriter and began to write very fast, starting off, as I remember, with something like ‘I hereby accuse Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Fleet and of the Pacific Ocean Areas, of high treason.’ And so on.”

The message seemed calm and clearheaded to him—at least the first three-quarters of it. He got more and more worked up as he wrote, however—the letter ran to more than three thousand words in the end—and in time he put in things that later “seemed muddle-headed if not hysterical.” Then, as he said, “after I had begun to use some profanity and obscenity about the Navy and its ways, I myself realized that I must have run out of ideas.” He terminated the message and dispatched it with a sergeant to the communications center, to be fired off to Washington, with another copy going directly to Nimitz’s headquarters. (It’s a footnote, but Mac had actually met Nimitz once or twice, including the year before, when he visited his headquarters at Pearl Harbor in the course of working out censorship protocols with the Navy. Nimitz, it turned out, wanted to talk not about censorship but about The New Yorker: he was a longtime reader and eager for some inside stuff.)

The future seemed very clear to Mac. Nimitz would be imprisoned, and he himself court-martialled and perhaps shot. He was looking forward to the court-martial and some of the things he would say to the prosecutor, and he was typing all this out in a fresh message to himself when a flight surgeon named Kissner turned up at his tent—it was eight o’clock in the morning—with two armed guards, and, as a first step, gave him two Nembutals and a cup of water.

News of Mac’s cuckoo accusation against Nimitz got around quickly. I heard about it that same day, all the way back at Hickam Field, when one of our Brief reporters on the scene rapturously radioed us that the Twentieth’s P.R.O. colonel had flipped out. The rumor mill had already enlarged Mac’s attack to include Lieutenant General Robert C. Richardson, Jr., the Army commander, and the Marine high command. The news, at my level, at least, was taken as entertainment: a break in the deadly boredom of the war. Surprise over McKelway’s fugue was universal, with the exception, perhaps, being Mac himself—if he was capable of any distance about his own thinking. In civilian life, he had gone through periods of unstable mental health, once spending three months in the Austen Riggs Center, a fashionable sanitarium in the Berkshires. Later psychiatric visits and consultations confirmed the diagnosis that McKelway suffered from mild manic depression and paranoia, which in contemporary practice could be called a bipolar disorder with mania and delusions. He had also shown signs of a disassociative identity, or split personality, at times reporting the conviction that he had twelve separate heads or identities. He had mentioned his history of mental problems to the major who was urging him to accept a commission, and the major told him not to bring it up with the doctors when it came time for his pre-service physical.

On Guam, things began to move quickly. Mac, awake again after four hours’ sleep, was placed under arrest and locked up in a hospital mental ward. That same day, he was told that his message delivered to Nimitz had now been “withdrawn,” because Mac had been suffering from operational fatigue at the time it was sent. It had never happened. General Arnold was fit to be tied about the whole thing, and LeMay had apologized to Nimitz in person. McKelway, after some tests, was released from the hospital and ordered to report forthwith to the Pentagon, where he would be granted an immediate thirty-day furlough. He packed his bags and went to dinner that last night, as usual, with LeMay and his staff. Everyone was friendly, almost deferential, and not a word was said about the Nimitz message. Reporting to Norstad in Washington after his multi-stage flight home, McKelway learned that Arnold had calmed down after a visit from Robert A. Lovett, the Assistant Secretary of War for Air (he later became Secretary of Defense), an old friend of Mac’s from New York who had often had him to dinner parties at his house. Mac went to Lovett’s office to thank him and, on leaving, found General Arnold in a reception room. As McKelway wrote, Arnold “didn’t say a word. He grinned and looked at me keenly, and then shook hands with me.”

McKelway had been on duty overseas for twenty-three months. He started his furlough by renting a small suite at the Ritz Hotel, and set about writing “A Reporter with the B-29s,” the four-part piece about his war so far. Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker, must have been told about Mac’s breakdown and the reason for his unusual furlough, but I’m not sure that many others knew. It was not being discussed anywhere when I got out of the service, at the end of the year, and only a few friends of Mac’s must have been in on the full story until he himself decided to tell it in his genial confessional, thirteen years later. A pause or parenthesis is required here to make it clear that the events set forth in this article are based on the B-29 series, and the 1958 follow-up, “That Was a Reporter at Wit’s End,” which qualifies this as another strange journalistic effort. McKelway is gone—he died in 1980—and there are few colleagues or friends of his, and no family, left to complain if it should seem unfairly personal, or a patronizing venture into long-distance diagnostics.

Mac’s text, however, is not the only surprise about that B-29s profile. He began writing it on May 26th, and its first installment ran in the issue of June 9th, which, since issues are postdated, means that the issue in which it ran went out to subscribers a week before. Mac never said that he’d been working on the story beforehand, while still out in Guam; he was far too busy for that anyway. As he states in its second paragraph, he began writing the piece on a pad of paper at 5:35 A.M., in his Washington hotel room. In New York, the first part was finished, edited, set into type, checked, proofread, and sent off to the printer in a week’s time, and the rest—it comes to more than twenty thousand words—shortly thereafter, which raises the possibility that McKelway had not yet come down from his manic high while at work on it. The writing, in any case, is not crazed or rushed but seizes the reader with its energy and its precise presentation of people and events and complex detail. It has the lovely clarity that writers smile at when it unexpectedly pours itself onto the page or screen, and mourn and grab for when it goes away. What one notices first, though, and remembers most after reading, is the glow of romance that surrounds McKelway’s war.

The first part of “A Reporter with the B-29s” introduces Generals Hansell and O’Donnell and the early Saipan raids; the next is about the early disappointments over Tokyo, a visit from Norstad, and the difficult replacement of Hansell by LeMay; the third covers LeMay’s boldness and the wild success of the spring fire raids; and the last, called “The People,” is about the pilots and ground crews and heroes of the Twentieth. Ross must have been ecstatic about the breadth of McKelway’s knowledge of an ongoing headline event in the war and his intimate association with its leaders. The young aviator generals Mac saw every day were among the best of their time: tactical and technical geniuses pushed to the top by the exigencies of war. Numbers of them moved along to significant posts after the war. Norstad, for instance, was the NATO commander in Europe in the tense times when the Berlin Wall was going up, in 1961. Curtis LeMay ran the Berlin airlift, and became a commander and virtually the father of the Cold War’s Strategic Air Command. Later on, he emerged as perhaps the most ferocious hawk of the Vietnam War, and ran for Vice-President on the George C. Wallace ticket, in 1968.

Mac knew them when. He is there with Possum Hansell and Rosy O’Donnell in early times on Saipan when Japanese fighter-bombers interrupt an outdoor night showing of the mystery movie “Laura” for the troops and officers, and on hand also when the deposed and gracefully departing Possum Hansell sings “Old pilots never die, never die,” etc., at a little staff party on his tent veranda. He sits with LeMay in his parked staff car, drinking Cokes in the middle of the night while the two await the first radioed reports from the great Tokyo fire raid. Mac was impressed by them, to say the least. At times, his prose reads like something out of Photoplay: “As a matter of fact, Possum looks like a wide-awake, smart, kind, somewhat preoccupied, and very efficient possum.” Emmett O’Donnell, in turn, is “all vividly articulate Irish-American Brooklyn-born lightheartedness, humor, and spiritual gaiety, except for an inner toughness and thoughtfulness which the pale face subtly intimates.” Mac resists the gruff LeMay on his arrival, but within weeks he has learned, “along with other staff officers, how to catch his soft and frequently arresting words, even when, characteristically, he mumbled them through his cigar.” He compares LeMay’s decision to send his bombers in at low level to Grant sending Sherman through Georgia, and concludes that it isn’t long before LeMay has “transmitted his own anxiousness to get the job done and the war over to every officer and man in the outfit he is commanding.”

It’s easy to dismiss this high-flown fluff as something from an earlier, non-ironic time, but we might also remember that McKelway had just severed his close connections to these compelling men, and was now permanently exiled from the scenes and strong emotions of warfare. His series takes on a persistently elegiac, almost literary tone, as in that Joycean rain falling on the white-capped Mariana sea, or, in an earlier image from the same passage, when he compares the B-29s’ “red and green flying lights and their orange landing lights” to “those colored necklaces of faraway railroad trains that run through American childhood.” More pointedly, there are many references to the “wonderful, tense, sleepless pace of the early days and nights on Saipan.” He feels that those “fine, free pioneering days” are over, especially when he goes to visit the vast new headquarters being thrown up on Guam, with its operations-control rooms and mission-planning rooms and quonset huts that will house adjutants and judge advocates and photo interpreters and statistical controllers. The war is changing, becoming faceless and enormous, and even before he and his P.R.O. staff are moved over to Guam with the others he misses his first tent on Saipan, with its six-foot lizards under the floorboards.

Something like this Kriegschmerz used to happen to many men not in immediate terror for their lives when the war they were immersed in drew near its close—it infects even the hilariously frayed and confused British staff chaps in Evelyn Waugh’s biting Second World War trilogy “Men at Arms.” But something even more bizarre comes over Mac when he writes about the ground personnel most involved in LeMay’s campaign and its rush of successes. He mentions the sleeplessness that accompanies the days and nights of hard work of those times, and a tenseness and quickening of tempo in the performance of tasks. Messengers walk faster, jeep drivers take care of their jeeps and never run out of gas. For all of them, whether airmen or ground crews or adjutants and their clerks, “the mind, the body, the spirit, the whole being seemed free and ready for anything and confident of success. It was not elation so much as it was a knowledgeable acceptance of maturity. . . . Good men were better. Men who had seemed mediocre became good.”

When McKelway died, at the age of seventy-four, his editor, William Shawn, wrote a four-column obituary, in which he called him one of the magazine’s quintessential writers, and said that “a thread of fantasy” ran through everything he wrote. If that is the case, there is no more fantastical or mythical a passage of Mac’s than the notion of goodness that he felt compelled to attach to the airmen in the Marianas. Writing about LeMay when they are sitting in that late-night staff car together, he concludes, “Here was a representative, I thought, of a great many men in all ranks who are better men than they have ever been before, better than most men anywhere. . . . It may be the people at home, I thought, who [when the war ends] will have to readjust themselves to these men, rather than the other way around.”

I have a memory of reading these McKelway lines aloud from The New Yorker to my G.I. colleagues in the Brief shack at Hickam Field and all of us falling about with laughter at their craziness, but I’m not so sure what to make of them now. For one thing, Mac always employed a lighter, more glancing tone when he was writing about his aberrations. He makes no mention of his Nimitz attack in the B-29 pieces—it had officially ceased to exist—or about the reason that he’d suddenly been sent home from the war and given the time to write about it. When he does take up these topics, in “That Was a Reporter at Wit’s End,” in 1958, he presents them as imaginary testimony given by him to the Senate Armed Services Committee—an operetta-like Q. and A. that permits him at one point to quote at length from his B-29 pieces. (New Yorker writers of the day were stunned with admiration or envy when they realized that Mac had been paid twice by the magazine for the same text—six long paragraphs of it—and this time at a higher word rate.) He is unrepentant, almost jolly, about the whole thing. This piece and the LeMay section of “A Reporter with the B-29s” appear in the new McKelway anthology, and so does an even longer New Yorker article of his—a hundred and eleven pages in the book—called “The Edinburgh Caper,” which recounts a different fit of madness that overtook him, during a trip abroad in 1959, when he became convinced that he had been given secret knowledge of a plot to kidnap Queen Elizabeth and President Eisenhower on the eve of a summit conference with the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. There’s a lot of elated boozing in this one—he spends one night in a Scottish drunk tank—along with a piercing sense of the excitement and super-clarity one feels when in possession of the absolute truth.

Mac’s “testimony” about the B-29s in the confessional gets around to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb raids, which were launched from Tinian by the B-29s Enola Gay and Bockscar in August, 1945, but he doesn’t linger on them; he wasn’t there. Nor does he say anything about the famous John Hersey piece “Hiroshima,” which took up the entire New Yorker issue of August 31, 1946. One’s attention falls bemused at the realization that these two unique works, appearing at different times in the same magazine, offered something close to the ultimate coverage, above and below, of the deadly events that struck Japan in the middle months of that year. McKelway thinks about this, too, when he gives the statistics I have quoted of the bombing damage and the casualties his men in the Marianas inflicted, before the A-bomb flights. A hundred and forty thousand Japanese died at Hiroshima, counting those who succumbed to radiation poisoning, and seventy-five thousand more at Nagasaki, but statisticians and historians are not always consistent when they combine or leave separate the totals inflicted by the prior B-29s. An official U.S. reckoning puts the total at three hundred and thirty thousand dead, not counting the A-bomb victims. Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense in the Johnson Administration, who was an Army Air Forces statistical-analysis officer during the war, and who discusses the fire bombings in the filmmaker Errol Morris’s 2003 documentary “The Fog of War,” ultimately claimed that the raids accounted for nine hundred thousand deaths in Japanese cities.

McKelway loses his perky tone when he writes about the first time he got to look at the intelligence photographs, back from Tokyo and elsewhere, and began to think about what they meant, and I have pretty well decided that these photographs and these not quite exact large numbers are what made him insist, oddly but not insanely, that our men in the Marianas were good. What he was thinking about back then is exactly the same question, the historic cliché, that good people like ourselves have been asking ever since, which is the exact number of enemies—whether soldiers and other combatants in battle, or families in their homes—it’s O.K. to burn or blow up while in pursuit of some urgent idea of ours about peace or justice or safety. It keeps you awake at night, still crazy after all these years. ♦

Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.